Tag: Reson

Video Tour of the Research Vessel Hugh R Sharp

October 19, 2010 / / 2 Comments

RV Hugh R Sharp ready for launchWe recently had guests come down to take a tour of the Lewes campus and the Research Vessel Hugh R Sharp. One of the guests was wheelchair-bound and was limited to only seeing the main deck of the ship as getting to the rest of the ship would have required going up and down stairs. The Sharp has accommodations for handicapped scientists, but they are pretty much limited to the main deck. This limits their access to just the aft working deck, the wet and dry labs, the galley and the conference room. The wheels started turning during that tour on how to share the rest of the technological awesomeness of the Sharp with others. I decided to take my trusty $100 video camera in hand and record a video tour of the ship for those that are unable to navigate the stairs, and for classrooms and visitors who just can’t make the trek to Lewes for a tour. It’s a tad long, running just over 40 minutes or so, but it covers almost the entire ship. Enjoy!

Many thanks to Captain Jimmy Warrington for taking time to do a whirlwind tour just prior to a science mission – as you can tell from the video, he’s a natural at relaying information about the RV Hugh R Sharp and its science capabilities.

Detailed drawings showing deck layouts and profiles of the Sharp can be found the RV Hugh R Sharp landing page, which includes PDFs of:

To help you orient yourself a little bit as to the spaces that were covered, here are some deck diagrams to show the overview of a few of the spaces.

SHARP-AftDeck

Aft Deck

SHARP-DryLab

Dry Lab

SHARP-WetLab

Wet Lab

Reson Seabat 8101 Multibeam Echosounder

August 11, 2010 / / 1 Comment

I lucked out not too long ago and happened to be at the right place at the right time (usually it’s the other way around). I ran into Brian Kidd, our resident expert on Multibeam Echosounder systems (also known as a Swath system) and he said he just happened to have the multibeam components apart for servicing.  I ran to get my camera and followed Brian around and asked all kinds of insightful questions (of course).  Echosounders are a version of Sonar (which stands for SOund Navigation And Ranging) wherein a transmitter emits a sound pulse downward into the water and then the amount of time that the pulse takes to come back to the ship is measured. A single beam echosounder will shoot a beam straight down and and use a single receiver to receive the pulse that bounced back from the bottom of the body of water. This is used to determine how deep the water is beneath the ship. A multibeam echsounder will emit a broad pulse of sound into the water and then will use multiple receivers aimed at various angles to measure the reflected sound.  These times are then processed by the computer to generate a “swath” beneath the ship and at some distance to either side which shows the height of the sea floor.  Moving the ship forward will give a band of height information beneath the ships track, and by moving in parallel, overlapping tracks, an ever-growing patch of sea floor heights can be mapped.

Okay, I’ve exhausted my general knowledge of the subject.  I’ll let Brian take the reigns and kick back and learn from the master…

 

At the 2009 RVTEC meeting, I sat in on the Swath/Multibeam workshop and updated the Swath/Multibeam section of OCEANIC’s International Research Vessels database for the UNOLS vessels. There were some huge swath transducer arrays being discussed at the workshop on some of the deep water vessels, so I was pretty surprised to see just how compact the shallow water multibeam systems can be. In the second part of the video, Brian shows us what the Reson Seabat 8101 transducer assembly looks like and how they mount the unit to the ship.

 

Many thanks to Brian for putting up with me and for taking time to share his knowledge of the Reson Seabat 8101 Multibeam System (PDF of specs here) onboard the RV Hugh R. Sharp.

Why two videos and not one? Apparently YouTube has a 10 minute max length for uploaded videos, so I broke the video into two parts.  Part 1 covers the monitoring and display station and Part 2 covers the mounting infrastructure and the transducer assembly. This works well for me as I doubt that too many people are able to sit through a 20+ minute video anyways, so breaking it up into two more digestible chunks is better in my opinion.

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